Publication and Platform Seminar
presented by Bergen Kunsthall
For the first time in the almost 60-year history of the Festival Exhibition, the 2012 project was moved in its entirety out of the institution’s exhibition spaces. With the exhibition Surplus, Marianne Heier showed that the Festival Exhibition is not just an exhibition rich in tradition in Norwegian art history, but also an active, experimental platform where artists are given space to comment on the context and social structures around the art in various ways. For the exhibition Heier produced two new works, the sculpture Vima, and the performance Diamond. This anthology was also an important part of the exhibition project in its own right. The book addresses and clarifies one of the central themes and discussions that are brought to the surface in Heier’s works.
The Swedish critic Kim West discusses Heier’s new project in the light of her oeuvre in general, with a special focus on the way she treats parallel value systems, and the value of art in this context. The journalist and writer Loretta Napoleoni contributes a new text on the structural implications of today’s global economic systems, while the social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen deals with global economic structures, with special reference to the (unique) economic wealth that has typified modern Norway. The cultural theorist, curator and poet Ranjit Hoskote looks at the concept of “artistic value” within the various value systems encompassed by Heier’s project.
Marianne Heier
Surplus
Published by: Bergen Kunsthall and Sternberg Press
Editors: Marianne Heier, Steinar Sekkingstad, Solveig Øvstebø
Texts by: Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Marianne Heier, Ranjit Hoskote, Loretta Napoleoni, Kim West and Solveig Øvstebø
Design: Blankblank
ISBN: 978-3-943365-09-2
Platform Seminar
Surplus
September 21 (4pm) Bergen Public Library, free entrance
With: Marianne Heier, Ingrid Hjertaker, Ranjit Hoskote, Trude Schjelderup Iversen, Kim West.
The conspicuous position of Marianne Heier’s exhibition in public space was an important element in the artist’s wish to appear in a wider public context with an incitement to further discussion at several levels. As a new stage in the dialogic development of the project we present a seminar that looks back on the exhibition and some of the reactions that arose in its wake. The seminar is an attempt to break down the traditional dynamics of the exhibition format, where the exhibition as postulate is answered by public discussion, criticism from the expert milieux and coverage in the media, but where it is rare to return to the exhibition and look at it again in the light of these reactions. To what extent can such a project contribute to public debate beyond the traditional art-critical discourse? What is the potential of art to engage in criticism with the artwork as language, and to make an impact in the larger public forum.
Platform is Bergen Kunsthall’s own lecture series. Platform includes presentations, lectures, and debates involving some of the leading artists, curators, and theoreticians on the contemporary art scene. Watch recordings of previous lectures at: www.kunsthall.no
Publication and seminar are both initiated by Bergen Kunsthall on the occasion of the festival exhibition Surplus at Bergen Kunsthall, May 24–July 5, 2012.
For more information and orders, please contact Bergen Kunsthall at [email protected] /
www.kunsthall.no.
